By Fernando Premoli
Prospects for Reconstruction: The false Dilemma of a Post-pandemic World
Most of the paradigms we used to lean on no longer exist; this is not new. In recent months, the concept of “pre” and “post” pandemic has changed: the virus has arrived, it is among us and, for sure, no one envisions its eradication in the short term, neither the possibility that it will not return.
The challenge is how to face this process that reveals the limitations of many public policies in the most varied sectors and geographies of Latin America.
It is clear that no one predicted this catastrophe, neither in its size nor in the aftermath. However, today it becomes necessary to adapt current policies to the reality of the years to come. And, to define solutions, we have to ask the proper questions.
Flexibility, dialogue and efficiency are pillars that governments, organizations and the business world must adopt for a prosperous regional future of sustainable development.
Flexibility
Governments will have to adapt their incentives to the business sector, offering new conditions that favor the growth of private capital. For this to happen, it will be necessary to rethink the recipes usually used — generally fiscalists — in order to assertively accompany the creation of wealth, employment and balance throughout the region. Cross-cutting incentives are a guarantee of transparency and equanimity in contexts of high demand for results and limited times to generate them. As crisis become more general, repeated recipes tend to fail.
Multilateral organizations will continue to provide resources, ideas and speed of implementation so that this new generation of policies quickly reaches its final objective, but not without first collaborating in mapping and identifying the needs of each specific territory.
The private sector should participate in the formulation of ideas, with greater involvement and the highest dose of voluntary commitment that it can deliver.
Dialogue
The tools for integration and the construction of consensus should become the way forward for all national and subnational governments of Latin America to determine common objectives and courses of action that impact adaptation to new realities.
In this case, the role of regional organizations is even more important, in order to generate dialogue between sectors, transcending physical borders.
The business community, preferably represented by its natural interlocutors, the chambers and groups, has a privileged and necessary place, providing a point of view based on the viability of the approaches and the paths to achieve the desired objectives.
Efficiency
As a last priority factor, efficiency will be a necessary condition for all those involved in the agreements and actions to make the best use of their limited technical and human resources, in order to solve the problems that the new reality is posing.
All this: adaptation to changes, openness to open dialogue and optimization of scarce resources must necessarily have a guiding framework, where the borders of Latin America, far from being configured as dividing limits, will seek to be vehicles to promote integration and, in this way, amalgamate the main guidelines of national governments and local actors.
Only in this way, the reconstruction, the pre and the post , will be concepts included in the texts and not the point of departure for the design of policies and programs in the years to come.
